Where is Heaven?

Mike LaTorra

So thank you all for being here, and thanks to Hank and the Institute for Ethics. Ethics and emerging technologies. Before I actually begin, I’d like to survey you a little bit. Hank was talking earlier about his own life and his multiple religious affiliations over a lifetime. Uh there are other people who have grown up in a single faith Faith. How many, and I think Lincoln will probably be one of them, grew up in a single faith and are still part of that? Okay. How many, like me and Hank, have multiple Different faith experiences. Okay. And how many are atheists? Okay, good. I’m glad to see you all here.

Mike LaTorra

because I think it’s really important that we respect one another and learn from one another as much as possible. If you stay within a group of like-minded people and resist any interaction with people who think differently, You’re going to have an impoverished experience. You’re not going to see the strongest arguments against what you believe in, and the people who have those arguments are also not going to hear from you. Why do you believe what you do, and maybe in that case, learn something.

Mike LaTorra

So, I’m going to look at multiple world models from different sources. We’ve already seen some different kinds of cosmologies here today. I’m going to present still another one and put it within the context of a broadly Eastern teaching, mostly Buddha. But first, let me talk about transhumanism as I view it.

Mike LaTorra

Transhumanism, I consider To be a species of meliarism, which is the idea of progress leading to an improved world through human effort. But it’s also satisficing. It’s considering alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. Therefore, transhumanism is not leading to the ultimate good. It’s leading to progressively Better and better conditions.

Mike LaTorra

I’m also going to be using the Buddhist Two Truths doctrine. Two truths. It sounds real dualistic. But it’s very simple. There’s a conventional truth. of ordinary life, and there is an ultimate truth, which from the perspective of our ordinary lives seems to be, when we hear it, metaphysical, perhaps contradictory. Particularly make sense.

Mike LaTorra

The Buddha, in contrast to what was common at his time in his place in India, around Around 500 before the current era, BC did not take an idealistic position. That is, he didn’t say there is this ultimate God Brahma, there are all of these things that you Have to believe. The Buddha began his teaching by saying: there is suffering. Actually, he used the word dukkha, which is often primarily translated as suffering, but the secondary, and I think actually more accurate, definition is unsatisfactory. Life is unsatisfactory. Satisfactory. If you surveyed any group of people at any point in history, the vast majority of them will have to admit that, yeah, things could be better. So, this is a realist argument.

Mike LaTorra

The Buddha did not argue that you had to believe a bunch of things. He said, look at your own experience. Is there suffering? Is it unsatisfactory? And then he pointed out that your experience, no matter what it is, is impermanent. It is not the same from one moment to the next. It lasts for some period of time. And changes. And he went on to explain, and I’m obviously compressing things substantially. Explain a path that leads to the end of suffering.

Mike LaTorra

So, in this sense, from the realist perspective, the Buddha began by saying something that’s very transhumanist. Life has many shortcomings. There is suffering. It’s not satisfactory. And there’s a path that leads to the end of suffering. The Buddha goes all the way to an ultimate. Truth. And my argument would be that transhumanism can’t actually take us that far for reasons that I’ll go on to explain today. But it is a necessary precondition. because we live in the time we live in, when we have science and technology that can be used to improve lives.

Mike LaTorra

And just as Lincoln said that His own religion, Mormonism, mandates transhumanism. I would argue also that Buddhism does.

Mike LaTorra

Now I’m going to define heaven quite arbitrarily as the ultimate place. And I want to distinguish that from paradise, which would be a really nice place. You can think of it as the difference in paradise and heaven. There can be any number of paradises that have different degrees of satisfaction of desires associated with them. You go to this place or that place and get this desire or that desire satisfied. And heaven would be some place where everything is perfect. What exactly that means, I’ll explain. In a little more detail by looking at some cosmologies and also some individual reports of people’s experiences of Different states. So I’ll say that a transhumanist paradise is possible, but not a transhumanist heaven. That that heaven, that perfect place, now we’re talking ultimate truth, is Reached by other means.

Mike LaTorra

So, what do we know about our universe? The world that we’re in, according to astronomy and astronomer Neil deGrasse uh excuse me Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are about uh one hundred billion atoms in a single strand of DNA, one hundred billion stars in a typical galaxy, and about one hundred billion probable galaxies in the Universe, that is, the universe we can observe. But there’s also the theory that the universe we observe is only one of many, many universe. Universes.

Mike LaTorra

According to Professor Andre Lind, a self-reproducing inflationary universe, which maybe is the type that we live in, Consisting of different parts, exponentially large and uniform due to cosmic inflation, with each part looking like a separate mini-universe or pocket universe, independent Into the other parts of the universe, would lead to a multiverse that is inconceivably vast. According to Lind and his collaborative Vitali Venturin. the number of possible universes with different geometrical properties could be counted at 10 to the 10th power to the 70. Power. So imagine 77 zeros following that 10 exponent, and that number then converted to zeros following that 10. This is about the most mind-boggling number I’ve ever encountered.

Mike LaTorra

And that is perhaps what existence. In physical terms, it is living in one of these pocket universes on one little planet in one little galaxy among hundreds of billions of others, and that pocket universe surrounded by many, many other ones. which is um theoretically countable, but it’s not feasible. You wouldn’t in a human lifetime be able to actually count that number of seconds. To just give you an idea, this is way beyond a billion. But how long is a billion seconds? Most of you have lived that long. About 30 years, 10 months, and a handful of days. That would be a billion seconds. So you may live for two or three billion seconds.

Mike LaTorra

There are a lot of ancient mythological cosmoses from the idea that the cosmos was a a bunch of starry lights on a crystal dome to the idea represented by this medieval woodcut of someone breaking through that concept to see that the universe is actually much more complicated. Different concentric levels or spheres that had different properties, wheels within wheels.

Mike LaTorra

The Buddhist cosmology, as traditionally taught, is divided into three broad realms, a sense-sphere realm, a fine material realm, and an immaterial. Realm. Each of these three realms is divided into several subsidiary planes for a total of 31 different planes of existence. Each one of these planes actually has many potential worlds. Within it. You can think of it as being like some of those pocket universes that we saw in the multiverse universe slide.

Mike LaTorra

I’m not going to read all of the text here, but the Sun Sphere realm is 11 planes in number. And this is where we live. There are seven better planes and four not so. terrific ones. We are low on the level of the good seven and just barely above the four that are not so Pleasant.

Mike LaTorra

The four lower realms are realms where there is a lot more suffering than what we have here. These are the hellish places to various degrees. Uh we’re not in hell, but you can think of it as um the elevator down from here, not that far. The better realms you can think of as um versions of this place that are simply superior in the experience there.

Mike LaTorra

So um in a very broad way, if you were To categorize all of your experiences in a lifetime as being either positive, negative, or neutral. And there’s actually a Buddhist exercise. Of doing this in a meditative way from moment to moment. Numerically, here, the realm we’re in, we have a fairly high percentage. Of suffering experiences, some neutral ones and some positive ones. If you look at our society, stratified according to wealth and people.

Mike LaTorra

People born with some genetic advantages over others. Some people have greater native intelligence, they’re better looking, they’re more athletic, they have better musical ability, and some of us, like me, Are deficient in some of these. My daughter says every time she hears me sing, don’t sing, Daddy, just don’t sing. Well, if you had a lot of money and you still could Couldn’t sing, you’d have a lot more friends. Because in our society, people who want things go to people who can give them things. So the experience of someone who Kant saying it’s not particularly good looking but has a lot of money. We’ll probably be superior in terms of first of clothes and food and living circumstances. That they can afford to pay for. And there will be a bunch of fake friends who will come to them and praise them and want to hang around with them. And so forth. So these are not your real friends. This is quite artificial, but nevertheless, you’ll have a lot of those pleasant experiences simply because you either inherited or earned a Bunch of money. Is this fair? No. But it is common. It is the world that we live in, in this plane.

Mike LaTorra

Higher planes. Within this sense of your realm, would be a bit like having more money, in that if you categorize your experiences numerically. Between positive, negative, and neutral, you’d have a lot more positive ones. Is this an ultimate good? No, but it’s a proximate good because people like to have positive experiences. I’d rather not have negative ones.

Mike LaTorra

The fine material realm, sixteen levels. Here, there is no gross matter at the level that we are at, but it is a form of matter. It’s a finer kind of matter. What this actually means, translate. the Buddhist perspective to the current modern understanding of atoms, I can’t really say. This is more conceptual based on subjective experiences that Buddhist meditators have had. have some more to say about that in a moment.

Mike LaTorra

Denizens of these realms enjoy greater bliss, power, luminosity, and vitality than do denizens Of this realm. So they live longer, they have even more positive experiences, and their nature is such that compared To us, they are thought of in a non-monotheistic sense as gods. And I can use that term gods, but I want you to understand. I’m not talking about a single ultimate God. I’m talking about people, beings, who have more power than we do, just as some people, where we live in this planet, have more money than we do. More political power or any other kind of influence. Then come the four immaterial realms.

Mike LaTorra

This is Mind only. The denizens of these four planes enjoy enormous lifespans, and the Buddhists, like Hindus. Like to use numbers, big numbers, 20,000, 40,000, 60,000, 80,000 great eons are their lifespans. How long is an eon? Well That’s never action. Defined.

Mike LaTorra

The way to think of it is subjectively. If you’ve ever had an experience, perhaps this was an experience during a meditation. Or perhaps you were zonked out of your mind on some chemical, and time seemed to slow way, way down. You thought it was an hour, it turned out to be a minute. This is something like what the experience is in these realms where no matter what proper time, clock time might be for you, the experience extends. For, it seems like forever, thousands and thousands of time units. The four planes here

Mike LaTorra

are named in accordance with the Buddhist levels of blissful meditation, the so-called jhanas. Infinite space, which you can think of as boundless. It’s the sense that there’s no boundary to it. When you are experiencing this jhana of infinite or boundless space, you feel like you’re in a huge space, just as this is a larger room than probably any room in your house, and yet you can also go To buildings that have still larger rooms than this, or you can go stand on the top of Mount Tamilpias, and there’s a lot of space all around you. So infinite space, infinite mind, similar, except now it’s not that you are in an infinite space, it’s that your mind has occupied this infinite or boundless space. You can’t find an edge to it. Then nothingness, which might sound really boring.

Mike LaTorra

and maybe even scary. But subjectively, the experience is um actually very wonderful. If you enjoy getting a good night’s sleep, you have some sense Of what a good quality nothingness can be. Then there’s this very paradoxical genre, which the Buddha called neither perception nor yet non-perception.

Mike LaTorra

The experience of this genre or with this plane would be like is very much like a flashing alternation between perceiving something and then the nothingness of that preceding genre, and then perceiving something again and then a nothingness. You’ve seen a movie film with a lot of individual frames and a black bar between each. So if the movie’s being shown and then the projector starts slowing down, you You begin to see the black bars between the frames, that’s a lot of what this neither perception nor yet non-perception is like. Except it’s also extremely blissful, which the movie Probably wasn’t. Now, this thing about the Buddhist cosmology is the goal that the Buddha taught was not to climb up to these higher and higher levels.

Mike LaTorra

Life in the cosmic worlds altogether is fundamentally limited. Experience in the cosmic domain is first of all impermanent, even at those highest levels in the highest levels of the immaterial realms, where you live for 80,000 eons. That’s still not forever. And they’re not fully satisfactory.

Mike LaTorra

This was a fundamental part of the Buddha’s realist critique: is that things Are impermanent, they’re not completely satisfactory, either because it’s simply painful or you were anticipating An experience, you finally had this experience you’ve been waiting for your whole life and it didn’t live up to your expectations. Or you have that experience and it’s tremendous, it’s even better than you. Expected, and then it’s over. So that’s not satisfactory. Finally, the Buddha said in a teaching that this Actually, very difficult for most people to grasp that there’s no essential being in experience itself. And this is really not that hard to understand. Your experience is not you. It’s something that is happening to you. You really exist in some fundamental sense. You have that being. Your experience does not.

Mike LaTorra

I tell my students never to do this, never put a big paragraph up here, but I’m violating my own rule. And I’m actually going to read this to you. You because it is a very good summary of what I said and where I’m going with this. According to Bhikkhu Bodhi, who is an American-born Theravadan Buddhist. Scholar and translator who completed the work of translating all of the major texts from the old Pali language. Into English.

Mike LaTorra

In Buddhist cosmology, existence in every realm being the product of kama, which we think of as karma here using the Sanskrit. rather than the Pali, and I’ll use the Sanskrit karma and other Sanskrit versions of the words. Being the product of karma with a finite potency is necessarily impermanent. Beings take rebirth in accordance with their deeds. experience the good or bad results, and then when the generative karma has spent its force, they pass away to take rebirth elsewhere, as determined by still another karma that has Found the opportunity to ripen. Hence, the torments of hell, as well as the bliss of heaven, and again, we’re talking about what I call paradise. The bliss of heaven, no matter how long they may last, are bound to pass. For this reason, the Buddha does not locate the final goal of his teaching anywhere in the conditioned world.

Mike LaTorra

He guides those who are still tender to aspire for a heavenly rebirth and teaches them the lines of conduct that conduce to the fulfillment. Of their aspirations. But for those whose faculties are mature and who can grasp the unsatisfactory nature of every Everything conditioned. He urges determined effort to put an end to wandering in samsara, the realm of rebirth, and to reach nirvana, which transcends all. Planes of being.

Mike LaTorra

So getting to a more satisfactory state of life. And one of those other planes that I just described, or in the world we live in now, is a kind of transhumanist goal. But it’s not The ultimate one. Making things better, but not making things perfect. Now I’m going to say something about the cosmos of Avatar Adidas Iran.

Mike LaTorra

Who was born in the United States in New York in 1939, named Franklin Jones. And as his spiritual life became profound and Enlightened, took different names, and at the end of his life, 2008, he was known as Adidas Samraj. For people who live in this area, the Bay Area, you may have seen something about Adida, met one of his devotees. For people who have looked at new religious movements, this is probably somewhat a familiar figure. Adidas describes seven stages of life.

Mike LaTorra

Stepping back from cosmology now, and we’re talking about human life. Potentials. There are three physical stages which correspond basically to the periods of childhood, adolescence, and then adult maturity. Beyond that, there is a fourth possible stage, which is spiritualization, which is actually becoming religious and spiritual. in some sense that is not arbitrary, but is based on the structure that we’re born with.

Mike LaTorra

The human body is capable of more experience more power, more bliss, more capability and more service to others than most of us ever get a chance to really Manifest. Beyond that, there’s a fifth and sixth stage of more subtle experience and deep what’s called self- Self-realization. The unique contribution of Adi Dasamraj was to explain a seventh stage of divine enlightenment, which is not following directly on the sixth stage. But becomes an orientation that can exist throughout life and could be entered actually in a profound way from the fourth stage on, the fifth and sixth. Six stages are things that could be passed through relatively quickly. Adidas Amraj has said. He also describes the cosmos.

Mike LaTorra

At a subtle level, as looking like this. He calls this the cosmic mandala. In visionary states or in the transition that happens after bodily death. people will experience some version of something like this.

Mike LaTorra

I say some version of something like, because if you’ve read reports of people who’ve had temporary Cessation of heart and brain activity, and say that they saw a light, they rose toward it, and so forth. They’re having a version of this experience. These series of concentric planes, again, are experienced potentially while you’re still alive and having a visionary Experience and after death, at least briefly experienced by everyone, before going on to whatever comes next, according to your Karma.

Mike LaTorra

By karma, I would like to say that while you may think of this as a lot of complicated cause and effect. which it really is, Adidas describes the after death as simply this. During your life you make mind. After death mind makes you. whatever mental states you have cultivated during your lifetime, that becomes the domain of your experience after bodily death. If you’ve been a very angry, bitter person, you’re going to have Some really bummer experiences. If you’ve been very loving, compassionate, and giving, your experiences will correspond to that, which you can think of as a reason to. Be nice. The red realm.

Mike LaTorra

This is corresponding to the lower realms of existence, those lower four, lowest four in. The first realm that I talked about before in the Buddhist cosmology. The gold and yellow plane, this is where we come in.

Mike LaTorra

We’re just above the red. And this yellow band is not a single world. There are actually many sub-bands, many worlds, probably many universes. Within this plane, and the plane is a plane of potential experience. There’s a white silvery part, which is

Mike LaTorra

Very thin and which is passed through quickly, and a black or dark blue part that’s an empty space. It’s a kind of nothingness, a little bit like entering a dark room. Before you turn on the light. Then the brilliant blue, subtle mental planes.

Mike LaTorra

This corresponds to the higher part. The non-material planes of the Buddhist cosmology. Avatar Adida has spoken about the subtle realms as benign places or dimensions of existence.

Mike LaTorra

Existence where the sense of separate self is hardly noticed. Thus, they are places of apparently limitless joy and bliss. Experiencing them is Is typically free of fear. One is freer to notice and participate in the inherent nature of existence itself, which is self-radiant love, bliss, consciousness, and light. The experience of pervasive and indescribable joy, love and radiance and awareness is characteristic of these subtle realms But even in the midst of such potentially magnificent experience, from the perspective of the highest realization, these most refined states of existence, though they’re full of joy and bliss, are still a condition. Of suffering, of non-realization. This is essentially the same argument that the Buddha made. However, at the very center is a white core.

Mike LaTorra

Often perceived as a five-pointed star. This is the gateway between the subtle realms of to excuse me from the subtle realms to the Divine domain, true heaven, domain of radiant transcendental being. So beyond the conditional cosmos, there is an ultimate place, what I’m calling true heaven.

Mike LaTorra

Now I’d like to share with you a couple of first hand reports of some of these planes above Where we are by some devotees of Ayurda Samraj. Ann Rogers reported this, and by the way, these experiences came through direct interaction. With Adidasam Raj, who said he wanted to show them something.

Mike LaTorra

She reports: In an instant, without any noticeable transition, there it was, another world. This was a beautiful place. And extremely attractive. I was in a room made out of amethyst crystals, yet there was no feeling of sharpness to the scene. It was peaceful and bright and felt very Happy and serene. Directly in front of me was a throne made largely out of crystals. Behind the throne was a window. It felt as if the room were an empty. Entry room or foyer into another world. I approached the window and opened it. It was glass with a frame and hinges to open and close. I could see through the window, but opened it to take a better look at the sight beyond.

Mike LaTorra

The throne. It was an earth-like meadow, but of the most beautiful quality. There was an exquisite light that made the colors of the meadow very vibrant, like the light here sometimes after a rain. There were flowers of different colors growing on the spring-green lawn and beautiful billowing trees that grew in a line which led up a slope to an inviting Forest. The place had the most serene and inviting quality. It had a radiance that is not often felt on this plane. Conimantis, who had told.

Mike LaTorra

Adida, that she was about to change in her nursing career to begin working in hospice. Said, let me show you something. This is what happened.

Mike LaTorra

First, there was an explosion of inner sounds. Then I felt the layers of the body-mind release and fall away. I, quote unquote, was separating out from the physical body and Seemed to fly upwards, whirling through dark space at an incredible speed. I was moving toward an overwhelming, brilliant light. At one point, I recall slipping through a kind of grid as a speck of consciousness. For an instant, I did seem to lose all self-awareness, but throughout the rest of the experience, I was aware of the most remarkable clarity. I found that I felt more familiar and at ease traveling. Without the body, than when I was dragging it along, anchored to it by my usual physical body identification. I felt myself to be alive as consciousness, at ease as the witness of Mind and attention.

Mike LaTorra

At different moments in this cosmic journey, I felt the deep urges of the body-mind drawing me back towards embodiment, and I sensed The frustration of having no physical body through which to enact or fulfill desires. This made a stunning impression on me. And I remember feeling how foolish it would be to waste the opportunity of a human lifetime to do this spiritual practice that could help free me of the binding attachments I had now seen so clearly. Adi Daz describes his visit to the high place of transition for beings who are in the last stages of embodied existence, about to pass through that star portal to the divine domain.

Mike LaTorra

It is the place of great souls who are being divinely translated, not by any merit of their own. In other words, this is not. Karma and the fruits of karma, but because they are attracted to the living divine. Attraction, love.

Mike LaTorra

I talked about the two truths, relative truth and absolute truth. Here is a description of the absolute truth.

Mike LaTorra

You are not consciously a separate entity, even though you may presume yourself to be such an entity through your usual association with experience. Experience. Conventionally, you believe that the realm wherein you are one with God is somewhere other than your present circumstance. You believe that the divine is someone else or other. You think that the divine is so profound you could not realize God except in a totally different state, circumstance, and dimension than this present one But God is simply the shining conscious being that is your nature at all times and under all circumstances. Now. So, in conclusion, transhumanism and transcendence, heaven or the ultimate place can be realized by spiritual transcendental practice.

Mike LaTorra

Practice, paradise, or an improved circumstance of enhanced human life can be realized by transhumanist means through science and technology. This is my. Argument. We need both transhumanism at the base and transcendence at the apex. Not the end, but the next. Thank you. Any questions?

Speaker 2

We have time for probably two, one and two. It strikes me, frankly, that transhumanism and Buddhism are paradoxical. Transhumanism seeks the Best that can possibly happen in the material world. Buddhism, as I understand it, sees the material world as an illusion. So while one revels in the material world and seeks to create perhaps some of these states that you described through materialism, Buddhism actually denies the material world in its ultimate sense. And so I don’t see how you could have both. I don’t see how they they fit in the same world.

Mike LaTorra

Thank you for that question. Um the notion that Buddha Buddhism sees the world as being uh completely illusory is is a very uh pervasive a misconception. What is considered to be an illusion is the version of the world that most people are perceiving. In other words, by analogy, um enlightenment which uh is the conventional translation of Bodhi, which literally means awakening. Enlightenment is awakening from the sleep, the dream World that we’re perceiving. The world really exists. How we perceive it, though, is an illusion. Another question, I think. In the front row, or somebody in the back? She had her hand up. Last question here.

Speaker 4

Well, I pretty much have the had the same question, but uh under slightly different angles. So uh what’s the take on this whole like Kurzweil wants to live forever, you know, never leave this physical body. And a lot of transhumanism is about, well, we have a possibility of attaining, of extending this biological lifespan. ad infinitum. So I think it totally goes against the Buddhism practices, which is a concept that we are incarnated into this body for particular Experiences, but that’s not the goal. So I wonder what’s the take on the ultimate lifespan? Yeah, again, the question is about perceived contradictions between Buddhism and transhumanism.

Mike LaTorra

And certainly there are a lot of transhumanists who view things differently than I do, since the majority of transhumanists are either atheist or agnostic. Among those transhumanists who, according to our own surveys of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, have any religious Or spiritual orientation at all. Buddhism is number one with something like 8%, and Mormonism is number two. But we’re a terrible minority compared to the vast majority. In my view, and again, I’m speaking from

Mike LaTorra

Myself, where transhumanism and Buddhism come together is this. The actual practice of Buddhism is about transforming the practice. The one who’s doing these practices, living the Eightfold Path, which is including not just meditation, but right livelihood, how you earn your living. You know, not by selling poison or committing crimes and so forth. A transhumanist utopia. so-called, with an extended lifespan, material abundance, freedom for people to follow their own bliss, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Campbell would be a place where trans Buddhist practice can be facilitated. Because speaking as a practitioner. And a Zen priest who works with a lot of other people practicing. Life is hard here, and it’s harder than it needs to be. It interferes with your opportunity. To practice. If you ever try to actually arrange in your schedule to go on a meditation retreat for a week or even just a weekend, Uh it’s not actually so easy to do. It’s it’s costly. There’s an opportunity cost, there’s a monetary cost. In a transhumanist world, as I envision it, where um the machin Are doing most of the work, and we’re being creative. If you wanted to go on a three-month meditation retreat, it would just be deciding to do it. So, transhumanism, in a very practical sense, can support a Buddhist practice. It doesn’t necessitate it, but it’s helpful. Would I want to live forever?

Mike LaTorra

Well, I’ll have to be completely honest with you now. We already do. As Adidas Amraj put it, everybody dies from time to time. The thing is, we don’t remember any of these previous lives, and it’s not even essential that we do. Sometimes, in the course of your Practice with meditation, you begin to get some feelings of things that have happened before. Things come up, and there are all kinds of stories of people finding out. Lived a particular previous life. But that’s not a requirement. The fact is that we have to deal with our karma as it is experienced in this lifetime. Living forever is something in this body. This body? Couldn’t I get a better one? And then better and better up to some point. Again, satisfying, yeah, better and better, but you get to a point where, as Connie Mantis said, carrying around the body is such a drag. Thank you.